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Lecture

Principles I: Economy of Mechanism & Fail-safe Defaults

In course

COM-301: Computer security and privacy

This is an introductory course to computer security and privacy. Its goal is to provide students with means to reason about security and privacy problems, and provide them with tools to confront them. ...

Description

This lecture covers the importance of security principles, focusing on the 'economy of mechanism' principle which emphasizes simplicity in security design for easier auditing, and the 'fail-safe default' principle which advocates for basing access decisions on permission rather than exclusion to ensure security even in case of failures.

Instructors (2)

Carmela González Troncoso

Edouard Bugnion

Edouard Bugnion joined EPFL in 2012, where his focus is on datacenter systems. His areas of interest include operating systems, datacenter infrastructure (systems and networking), and computer architecture. Before joining EPFL, Edouard spent 18 years in the US, where he studied at Stanford and co-founded two startups: VMware and Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco). At VMware from 1998 until 2005, he played many roles including CTO. At Nuova/Cisco from 2005 until 2011, he helped build the core engineering team and became the VP/CTO of Ciscos Server, Access, and Virtualization Technology Group, a group that brought to market Ciscos Unified Computing System (UCS) platform for virtualized datacenters. Prof. Bugnion is a Fellow of the ACM. Together with his colleagues, he received the ACM Software System Award for VMware 1.0 in 2009. His paper Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors" received a Best Paper Award at SOSP '97 and was entered into the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2008. At EPFL, he received the OSDI 2014 Best Paper Award for his work on the IX dataplane operating system

Official source

Related concepts (14)

Free software

Free software or libre software or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program.

Software

Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists of machine language instructions supported by an individual processor—typically a central processing unit (CPU) or a graphics processing unit (GPU). Machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state.

Proprietary software

Proprietary software is software that, according to the free and open-source software community, grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting their freedoms.

Software cracking

Software cracking (known as "breaking" mostly in the 1980s) is an act of removing copy protection from a software. Copy protection can be removed by applying a specific crack. A crack can mean any tool that enables breaking software protection, a stolen product key, or guessed password. Cracking software generally involves circumventing licensing and usage restrictions on commercial software by illegal methods. These methods can include modifying code directly through disassembling and bit editing, sharing stolen product keys, or developing software to generate activation keys.

Market mechanism

In economics, the market mechanism is a mechanism by which the use of money exchanged by buyers and sellers with an open and understood system of value and time trade-offs in a market tends to optimize distribution of goods and services in at least some ways. The mechanism can exist in free markets or in captive or controlling markets seek to use supply and demand, or some other form of charging for scarcity, to choose among production possibilities.

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